I’ve not blogged much at all lately, because I’ve not yet discovered how to combine blogging and work without revealing too much about my clients. And of course I tweet (panklam). What I have blogged, I’ve done over at TheAppGap. Here are two of my recent posts from there:

The Connection Collaboration Continuum, about the pattern I’m seeing in how social platforms (which I would define as any web-based site that provides some set of collaboration and social media tools)

So, an alert follower picked up that I was thinking about a new way to think about work that is different from net work. I wrote Net Work in 2007, I consciously left out technology, except to provide a bit of a placeholder in an appendix. I knew that the landscape in social tools was changing rapidly and that my book would be out of date within months if I tried to talk about specific technologies. (I’m still quite happy with that decision.)

For my work, I consciously separate the words net and work to underscore that networks take work, intentional design and maintenance. This is true of our organizational networks as much as it is about our personal networks.

Now I found myself uniting the words open and work to provide a metaphor to convey that the networks we live in (because we live in networks all the time) provide the scaffolding for openwork, which is constructed so as to show openings – for meaning, for connections, for knowledge transfer – through its substance.

I am particularly happy to see how Maya positioned the need for learning officers to leverage networks. And the best way to leverage networks is to understand their structures and the people who play key roles in them. Dr. Stephenson identifies three types of key people: “Hubs,” “Gatekeepers,” and “Pulsetakers.” Knowing who these people are in any given network offers the opportunity of moving knowledge more efficiently through the organization.

Here are Maya’s four steps for CLOs to get started on their net work:

Understand what your organization gains from a network. Great diffusion of information? Access to the influential people? Help people across the organization connect?

Identify the set of venues — networking space, blogs, communities — that are currently in use or that can be used strategically to nurture networks

Use the key people you’ve identified to help seed the network

Stand back and let the network do its work

Nice job, Maya, of getting the word out to another vital senior audience.

Today I am adding my voice to those who are rallying via blogs to protest the possible shutdown of the Boston Globe by its parent, the NY Times Co. If we were marching in front the NYT offices, carrying banners and placards, my would read: “Lead the revolution, don’t turn your back on it.”

Clay Shirky has written and spoken eloquently about the reasons for the demise of newspapers and suggests that perhaps “they had it coming” for not seeing the internet coming. But he also says, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” And an environment — a social architecture — in which journalists can learn their craft from masters. Newspapers provide such an environment, and the Globe’s rich history of journalism awards speaks for the generations of apprentices who have become masters.

We are in the middle of a revolution, and the economics of running a newspaper in a time when people can get their news from the internet are stark. The old business model is not affordable, but that doesn’t mean we should shut down the business — we need creative thinking of the kind that wins journalism awards to design a new model that gets the news to the online masses as well as provides investigative reporting, reflection, and context.

A friend once told me about a science fiction book he’d read. Post apocalypse, in a world bereft of information and telecommunications technologies, knowledge was passed only from person to person. One day, a character perhaps like our modern Wall-E digs through an ancient garbage dump and discovers a new technology that will bring this distopic society back to light: a pencil.

Pretend, for a moment, that it is February 17th and I was blogging as I was supposed to. I would have written a blog post about a great new collaborative brainchild of Nancy White and Tony Karrer that I feel privileged to have been invited to. It’s call the Communities and Networks Connection, and you will see my badge posted proudly here.

February 17th was the launch date, and I missed it while deeply immersed in a windowless office at a client’s site, where my primary task is to bring the concepts and (more importantly) the practices of networks and communities to bear. So I really need to pay more attention.

The Communities and Networks Connection has a number of really terrific aspects. It aggregates the blogs of many of the thought leaders in community and network thinking, featuring many people I’ve come to know and work with. So, it’s kind of like one-stop shopping. On one site, I can check on the most recent blogs of people I already subscribe to including Jessica Lipnack (Endless Knots), Lilia Efimova (Mathemagenic), Shawn Callahan (Anecdote), Valdis Krebs (TNT – The Network Thinker), Jenny Ambrozek (21st Century Organization), John Tropea (Library Clips), Mike Gotta (Collaborative Thinking) as well as Nancy and Tony linked above but I also can see what bloggers I’ve been missing and start to pay attention.

On the site, you can see the aggregated posts for the day, or click on any of the featured members. If you click on Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness from there, you’ll see that it has also has mined my posts for keyword concepts, tools, and information types. These keywords are all rolled up on the site’s main page.

Thank you, Nancy and Tony, for rolling out such a service — to all those who want to see the latest thinking on communities and networks in one place, nicely organized, and bound to be an exciting stop on the morning’s reading lists.